Christus Muguerza takes a patient-centered approach supported by Google Cloud

Christus Muguerza is a health system consisting of 14 hospitals, one short-term inpatient clinic, 13 primary care centers, 79 occupational health infirmaries, an ambulance system, and 2 nursing schools.

Present in 7 Mexican states, the company has over 7,000 workers and a network of more than 5,800 physicians committed to the wellbeing of patients and their families. As a result of digitalization at its hospitals and AI solutions, Christus Muguerza ensures a strict follow-up of each patient’s clinical process.

Devoted to patient experience

Christus Muguerza needed to combine patient clinical information and automate its analysis to provide postsurgical patients with better care and effectively control their pain.

While the health system had an innovative team of top-level professionals for pain treatment, each patient’s information was isolated and manually processed, hindering monitoring and analysis. Consequently, anticipating the emergence of pain in complex situations was impossible and it was treated only when the patient reported it.

In 2017, the company embarked on a digital transformation path that significantly improved doctor-patient interaction. By 2019, it had implemented an electronic medical record resulting from a joint effort between medical management and IT.

Connecting people, resources, data and solutions with agile, affordable, high-quality medical care became a challenge that spearheaded the company’s goals.

In this scenario, one of Christus Muguerza’s primary goals was to streamline and innovate the pain control process by developing a predictive model that would allow it to anticipate the medical needs of postsurgical patients in real time.

Simple processes improving patient experience

With this clear goal in mind, the company reached out to Google Cloud in search of an experienced partner that could provide technical assistance as well as a robust technical solution to streamline processes.

This is how Christus Muguerza’s journey with Google Cloud began. In less than a month, the organization managed to implement a new, automated, quickly-scalable multicloud environment.

One of the main Google Cloud products used was Dialogflow to help manage user-cloud conversations, interpreting the patient with natural language processing to understand which part of the body is in pain.

Firestore stores real-time reports while BigQuery keeps long-term information. In addition, Pub/Sub is used to receive notifications of new reports on a patient’s pain through DMs.

The company also implemented tools such as Vertex AI, for gathering and analyzing information through machine learning, and Cloud Functions, for calculating the risk of each incident, assigning a team of doctors, notifying the departments involved, and retrieving information from the electronic record.

Migration to Google Cloud was conducted remotely by training 79 workers from the technical team and 15 from the clinical staff. In just 3 months, they had the knowledge they needed to work under this new dynamic.

A safer environment with multiple benefits

In a constantly evolving digital era, protecting electronic information has become a great challenge, especially in the healthcare sector, where the privacy and security of medical data is an ongoing concern for organizations and patients alike.

The safe Google Cloud infrastructure helped Christus Muguerza face this challenge with absolute confidence. Besides improving the processing and analysis of large volumes of data, features such as encryption have helped the company encrypt in transit and at rest. Data can now only be accessed through authorized roles and services in the company.

Google Cloud’s solution suite allowed the organization to automate complex processes and streamline information management. Tasks such as reporting, that used to take hours, now take just a few seconds, all within an encrypted environment that ensures absolute user confidentiality. Furthermore, the company was able to process 35,000 applications a month using Google Cloud APIs.

Patient service improved exponentially, with more than 40% of time saved for workers, providing higher availability so that the medical team could focus on each patient. Today, 77% of acute pain episodes can be predicted.

Some hospitals, like the one in Saltillo, maintained 97% of patient satisfaction in terms of pain control in 2022, with a significantly lower investment in time and effort. This figure underscores the positive impact of Google Cloud.

Huge savings in infrastructure costs were also achieved, as well as 90% automation in the general flow of Christus Muguerza’s health system, all in record time.

This meant that Google Cloud solutions helped the organization strengthen its health ecosystem and deliver a better patient experience, saving 450,000 dollars in infrastructure.

The future of the health sector is in the cloud

Christus Muguerza’s leitmotiv will continue to be optimizing patient care with a pain prediction and treatment system that is 100% integrated in Google Cloud. Today, the company is ready to replicate and expand service improvement to other hospitals.

Looking ahead, one of the company’s main objectives is to scale and reach a data-based, more customized and predictive service that may help professionals make decisions grounded on accurate information, driven by machine-learning technologies that are already in place.

With Google Cloud, the company has learned to create agile architectures based on events that now make it possible to quickly process all the transactions involved in each project. From here on out, identifying the best architecture practice will become part of the challenge to keep escalating and replicating the company’s service in future healthcare centers.